A Day in the Life of an Irish Blacksmith

Céad Míle Fáilte, and you are very welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. We continue to enjoy a remarkable summer here in Ireland, but no doubt the farmers will, quite rightly, be looking for some rain. How are things in your part of the world today?

One of the most pleasant things about these days and evenings is heading off into the countryside for a drive – to nowhere in particular, just enjoying the sights and smells of high summer. Earlier this week, Carina and I headed off on such a drive. I asked her where she would like to go.

“How about we head up towards Forge Hill?” she replied.

And so we did – and that also got me thinking about a great topic for today’s letter: A Day in the Life of an Irish Blacksmith.

There is a cup of Lyons Tea at my elbow as I write, and I do hope you’ll join me now, with a cup of whatever you fancy, as we start into today’s letter.

Over the years, so many readers have told me about an Irish blacksmith somewhere in their family tree. It is a trade that turns up again and again in the old records, beside a man’s name in the census and civil records, as a smith, blacksmith or farrier. Behind that one small word stood one of the most important roles in the parish.

So this morning I want to bring you to a forge. Come with me to the village of Duagh, in north County Kerry, in the rolling country east of the Stack’s Mountains and a few miles south-east of the market town of Listowel. It is a warm morning in July of 1896, and the smith’s name is Mossie Stack – a made-up name based on a real person. His day has started long before yours.

Before the Village Wakes

He is at the fire before six in the morning. He was always an early riser, but these past years he wakes before he means to, on his own side of the bed, even though Hanora has been gone five years now. Their eldest girl, Nora, just sixteen, keeps the house as her mother did, and the smell of the food cooking is crossing the yard as Mossie coaxes the fire back to life.

By the time the boys arrive, the forge is breathing. Miah, the elder of the two sons still at home, takes to the bellows without a word. Dinny, the younger, is seventeen, and their cousin Batty, the son of Mossie’s late brother, is learning the trade alongside them. Three young men at the one fire, and Mossie the gabha over them – himself the son of a smith, for his father Thomas stood at this same anvil, and his father before him.

A country forge holds the work of a village and its townlands together with iron. In a week, Mossie will shoe horses and the odd stubborn donkey, then shrink an iron tyre onto a cartwheel, lay the blades of scythes, forge coulters and harrow pins, and set an edge on the slanes used for gathering turf. There is newer work too, for horse-drawn mowing machines are appearing on the larger farms, with gears and blades no village smith had mended before. Whatever is made of iron and breaks – and everything made of iron breaks in the end – finds its way to the forge.

The Harvest Begins

There is no shortage of work in July. This is the start of the hay gathering, and the whole countryside is anxious. A farmer is at the door of the forge before the dew has lifted, with a mowing machine that will not cut; another arrives with a scythe to be laid, and a third with a horse to be shod. The forge is a hard place in the summer heat, with the fire never letting up and the July sun topping it up. By midday, the sweat runs off the four of them, and young Kate, Nora’s sister, thirteen and still attending school, is sent to the well for water.

Money is always slow to come in. While a man might pay with money, it is just as often with a promise, a few pounds of butter or a day at the turf – and Mossie keeps half of it in his head and half in a ledger. Mossie has to carry the cost of the iron and the good coal brought west by rail, and he is soft where a harder man would insist on being paid.

There is a young horse this morning that has never felt a shoe, and it dances around the yard. Shoeing a frightened animal is slow, dangerous work, for it can break a man’s arm with one kick. Mossie talks to it, low and steady, while Miah holds the head, and in the end the shoe goes on. Thirty years ago, he would not have given it a second thought, but this morning his heart is going, and when the job is done, his hands have the smallest tremble in them.

For that is the thing he does not say to the boys. The strength is going out of him. He is only forty-nine, but a forge ages a man, and he was born in the hungry year of 1847, when there was little food around to build a child’s bones. The sledge he once swung all day now leaves his shoulder aching into the night. Of an evening, when the others have gone in, he sits on the edge of the anvil and looks into the last of the coals.

The Talk of the Parish

The forge has always been more than a place of work. It is one of the meeting places of the parish, warmer than the chapel and cheaper than the public house. Here Mossie has heard every turn of the latest stories: the land trouble, the evictions and the boycotting, and, like a death in the family, the fall of Parnell and the heart going out of people afterwards. But politics is quieter now, and the talk turns to the one subject that emptied so many kitchens across Kerry and Ireland: the sons and daughters, cousins and neighbours who have gone away.

His own eldest, Tom, has been gone these past three years, to a great ironworks in Toronto, though he is tending a machine now, not a fire of his own. He writes when he can, and now and again a small money order comes with the letter, and Mossie is both proud of him and lonely for him in the one breath. There is a station at Listowel now, and the North Kerry line can carry a young man the long road out, towards the boat at Queenstown and across the water. The wide world is coming closer, and for the young of the parish, it nearly always means the road out.

Who Will Take the Anvil?

And that is the question weighing on Mossie this morning, more heavily than any work the day will bring. He is a smith, the son of a smith, and always thought the forge would pass to a son of his. He watches Miah at the bellows, one and twenty and as good a smith as he has trained, and prays the boy will stay and take the anvil. But he sees the faraway look in him too, the same look that took Tom.

He hears Dinny and Batty reading the letters from cousins in Boston and Toronto, drawing wages that no forge at home could pay. And Mossie wonders, as many an Irish father of his time must have, whether the kinder thing is to hope they stay or to hope they go. Will a son of his have the better life here at this fire, or in America, Canada or England, working on the buildings? He does not know. He turns back to the horse because the work, at least, he knows.

By the time the Angelus rings at noon, Mossie Stack has shod three horses, hooped a wheel, laid a pair of scythes and sent a mended mowing machine up the road for the hay. Nora will have the dinner ready. The fire will be banked and lit again, and the whole of it will be done over in the afternoon, and tomorrow, and the day after that.

The People Who Held Ireland Together

I think of a man like Mossie – born Maurice – and of how much of Ireland stood on the shoulders of tradespeople whose names never made a history book. The blacksmith, the midwife, the tailor, the schoolmaster, the woman who kept the house going. If there is a smith in your family tree, and there may very well be, then you carry a little of that forge in you – the heat and the patience and the long labour of it.

I find myself asking the question that Mossie could not answer. When the young left that village, and they did leave in their thousands, was it a loss or a beginning? Perhaps both. Perhaps your own people were among them, and the whole of the life you have today began on the morning one of them walked down to catch the train at Listowel.

So, let me leave you with one question this week: Do you have tradespeople in your Irish family tree? Perhaps a tailor, a weaver, a mason – or even a smith like Mossie Stack?

Do let me know in the comments section below.

Slán for now,

Mike

Historical note: Maurice Stack and his family are composite characters. Their lives are imagined, but the work of the forge and the world surrounding them are based on rural north Kerry in the closing years of the nineteenth century.